MindComet

Lashback & Yahoo! Team Up

ExactTarget is reporting that Lashback and Yahoo! are now working together to determine senders’ “unsubscribe reputation”. What is Lashback, you ask? Lashback is a service that basically oversees and identifies which senders are honoring unsubscribes and which are not. They report on the Spam counts from reputable senders as well. For instance, when a user marks an email as Spam from a sender that has a good unsubscribe compliance, Lashback steps in and makes sure it’s actually marked as an unsubscribe request and not a Spam complaint.  They have dubbed themselves as being “The Email Compliance Authority”.

For any sender who’s using a major ESP, they have nothing to worry about as all ESPs remove unsubscribed addresses pretty much immediately. If you’re a small business or a sender who doesn’t have a lot of resources, it is more likely you’re keeping track of your unsubscribes manually. If you miss one, it may come back to bite your reputation… especially with Yahoo! addresses, in this case.

Along with overseeing sender reputations and righting wrongs, they’re also trying to educate users with a plugin available for download. Once installed, the plugin helps compile unsubscribe information which can report when senders are not honoring opt-out requests. The gist of the service is to identify which senders / entities are not following CAN-SPAM rules. Seems to be quite useful.

The only question I have is do they allow a grace period of 10 days before they start reporting on an unsubscribe or is it immediate? This could be problematic if it’s the former, as CAN-SPAM rules state that a recipient needs to be removed from the list within 10 days.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Nov. 17, 2009